If You Have No Evidence God doesn’t Exist, Why Don’t You Believe in Him?

The questions offered over on Elucidations on Atheism are so interesting that most of my writing now happens over there. I’ll keep blogging here, but if you like what I do and enjoy the conversation (and want to see people doing it better than me) then you should definitely follow Elucidations on Atheism.

This post conglomerates two questions that people asked Elucidations on Atheism: “Why can’t you provide any empirical evidence that God doesn’t exist? Atheists are always asking believers to prove that God exists, but they never offer any counter-evidence” and “Why don’t you believe in God?”. The themes were similar, so I fused them.

Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell both told little allegories to explain why you do not need evidence of God’s nonexistence to withhold belief in His existence; the rational way to process claims is to not accept a claim until you have access to sufficient evidence. The alternative is to accept every claim until someone brings evidence to the contrary. That approach would mean you should believe in aliens, psychics, zombies and vampires; after all, what evidence do you have that they don’t exist?